Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

I have a collective sense of suffering.

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

Fear is the mother of morality.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

To compromise simply means that you go a tiny bit below what you know is right.

I feel like I want to take care of everyone and I also feel this terrible guilt if I am unable to. And I have felt this way ever since all this success started.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

You never make fun of anybody with a club foot or a withered arm, but it’s open season on anybody who stutters.

We all have the duty to do good.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

In order to have friends, you must first be one.

A state arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

Instead of judging people, we need to pray.

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.

What money is better bestowed than that of a schoolboy’s tip? How the kindness is recalled by the recipient in after days! It blesses him that gives and him that takes.

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

Jesus never mistreated anyone just because they mistreated Him. He confronted them in a spirit of gentleness and then continued to love them.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

When we’re looking for compassion, we need someone who is deeply rooted, is able to bend and, most of all, embraces us for our strengths and struggles.

If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge? We shouldn’t marginalise people for this. They must be integrated into society.

One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

I don’t believe in killing whatever the reason!

We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths.

If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.

If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.

We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.

You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

There’s no difference between one’s killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It’s exactly the same thing, or even worse.

No person who is well bred, kind and modest is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want for manners or of heart.

It is more agreeable to have the power to give than to receive.

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

I’ve never been a manipulator, even in my bachelor days. I never wanted to do things to people that could catch up with me later on.

Do right. Do your best. Treat others as you want to be treated.

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.

Real magic in relationships means an absence of judgment of others.

In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. The young they keep out of mischief; to the old they are a comfort and aid in their weakness, and those in the prime of life they incite to noble deeds.

You pity the fool because you don’t want to beat up a fool! You know, pity is between sorry and mercy. See, if you pity him, you know, you won’t have to beat him up. So that’s why I say fools, you gotta give another chance because they don’t know no better. That’s why I pity them!

I’m not generally a sensitive person, but I tend to be more sensitive toward others and what they’re going through. I don’t know if that’s the healthiest thing, but it’s the truth.

I gave ‚em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.